The present invention generally relates to the field of telecommunications and to systems and methods for managing telephony-based services. More particularly, the present invention relates to automatically redialing a called number according to predetermined dialing criteria until receiving an answer status or reaching a maximum limit.
Today, due to busy life and work environment, it is often difficult to reach a person on their telephone and many people still do not have answering machines or subscribe to voice messaging systems. Many people have several telephone numbers, including a wireless phone, an office phone, and a home phone. While there are enhanced features available for a called party to forward calls between phones, due to busy life and work environment and convenience factors, many people do not regularly forward their telephone calls. Also, many times a wireless phone is unavailable for various reasons. Many people only turn on their wireless telephone when they are away from their wire line phone. Also, wireless telephones, because of their battery limitations and other factors including convenience, are turned on and off by the wireless user. Furthermore, a wireless telephone user may be unavailable because the wireless telephone is outside of the service range of their wireless telephone provider. Therefore, people are often unavailable by phone.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems and methods that overcome the limitations and drawbacks of conventional systems by redialing a called number at intervals until receiving an answer status or some other criteria. If an answer status is received, the called party is connected with the calling party.
The present invention is directed to systems and methods for receiving a no-answer status from a telephone call to a called number from a calling number, and redialing the called number at predetermined intervals or according to some other criteria until receiving an answer status or reaching a maximum limit. If an answer status is received, the called number (i.e., the called party) is connected with the calling number (i.e., the calling party). Preferably, the invention is implemented on an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) wire line telephone system.
According to aspects of the invention, a subscriber is prompted for, and a system receives, redial options such as frequency of how often to dial the called party, a maximum duration of time or number of attempts to dial the called party, a specific time to dial the called party, a time to begin regular calls to the called party, or a telephone number to dial the called party. Alternatively, the system may prompt the calling party for a priority level (e.g., high priority, low priority) and the system may determine how often and for how long to dial the called party. Preferably, the prompt is audible voice notification. Preferably, redial options are received through either telephone keypad entry or through voice recognition and processing techniques.
According to further aspects of the invention, the system may provide the called party with an indication that it has a call from the calling party. The system may also provide a prompt to the called party for connection selection and has the ability to receive a command or other input from the called party.
According to other aspects of the invention, a subscriber list may be provided including a list of subscribers.
The above-listed features, as well as other features, of the present invention will be more fully set forth hereinafter.